Spermicide was the hostess at this time, and in combination with NYHC people making appearances on daytime TV talk shows and the mainstream media’s skinhead hysteria of the late '80s, it felt like I was peaking in on a secret, dangerous world. I started listening to and taping Crucial Chaos on Thursday nights. I heard Bad Brains for the first time on WNYU’s Crucial Chaos right when Quickness came out and it scrambled my brain in the best way. WSOU, WNYU - if these stations didn’t exist, I don’t know where I would have ended up. I am trying really hard not to be “that guy” but younger folks have no idea how important college radio was pre-internet. I learned about so many different styles of hard rock and metal in the late '80s through that station. I quickly went down the rabbit hole, making my parents tape Headbanger’s Ball for me (pre-Riki Rachtman, when they only had guest hosts) and recording entire afternoons of metal off of WSOU (Seton Hall’s radio station that was all metal at the time). The other had Ride the Lightning on one side and Blizzard of Oz on the other. He was deep into metal and made me two cassettes that really blew my mind - one cassette had Maiden’s Piece of Mind on one side and Killers on the other. When we moved to Whitestone, I befriended an older kid who lived across the street from my grandmother.
I distinctly remember watching the Mets in the ’86 World Series with my parents while I had headphones plugged into a boombox that I was using to record the mix shows. I started saving my allowance to buy rap tapes and spent hours recording Chuck Chillout and DJ Red Alert radio shows on Friday and Saturday night on Kiss FM and WBLS. Experiencing the city in the mid-'80s meant you had some exposure to hip-hop, breakdancing and graffiti. My parents constantly played music at home - all of the Baby Boomer classics - the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown, James Brown - you name it, it had a presence in the household. I started to develop my own tastes at a really young age. My mother had two brothers and a sister and all of them have musical talent and were generous with their knowledge and record collections. What kind of music did you gravitate towards as a kid? Did you have any older mentors that would introduce you to cool music? We were lucky to grow up in NYC during that era of music. '92-'93 is around the time I really started going to hardcore shows and getting more involved with the subculture. Family life got complicated around '92, when my grandmother became ill with cancer and my mother also became ill with the same disease shortly after.
I was an outgoing kid obsessed with music from an early age. I was lucky to have a tightknit family during those early years. What was your family like back then and what kind of kid were you ? My grandfather died in 1985 and at that point, we moved into the second floor of my grandmother’s house in Whitestone so that my mother could look after her. I’m pretty sure the building is still there and looks exactly the same. Queens is the boro! I was born in 1977, my parent’s only child, and lived in Bayside in an apartment building that overlooked Clearview Park Golf Course on one side and faced the Throgs Neck Bridge on another. Since we’re both Queens natives, I’m curious, where were you born and what neighborhood did you live in growing up? With all this in mind, it was inevitable that I would end up chatting with Billy about his life and music for No Echo. The "lifer" thing applies to Billy because not only is he still an avid punk fan, but he also continues to create music, albeit electronic-based, under the name M//R. Following Saetia's break up, he sang for Hot Cross, releasing a grip of records before bowing out in 2007. Back in the '90s, he fronted Saetia, a group many refered to as "screamo," but I'm hesitant to use that term as it might conjur up some stuff that definitely wasn't what Billy and his band mates were about. Billy Werner is one of those kinds of individuals.
No Echo readers know how much I use the term "lifer" when discussing many of the people I cover on the site and their connection to hardcore and/or metal.